Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  “They found him over in Emerson Village Estates,” Nancy informed her. “That new subdivision he’s developing? He’s only got one house up so far, and that’s where they found him.” She ducked into a stall and emerged with a square of toilet paper, which she used to blot her lips.

  “Found him?” Alone or with Blondie?

  “Shot through the head with a nail gun.”

  Lainie sank against the counter and gaped at Nancy. “What are you saying? Arthur was—”

  “Murdered. With a nail gun.”

  “Oh, my God.” No one got murdered in Rockford. Adultery might happen here, but not murder. Lainie had lived in town for twenty-five years, and she perused the local newspaper’s police log religiously. The listings included the sort of small-town incidents you’d expect: motor vehicle accidents, acts of petty vandalism, shoplifting, telephone harassment, and the like. Occasionally, an amusing report would get published: Police rescued a dog that had locked itself inside a bathroom. Police dispersed a group of teenagers who were trying to hug the high school at midnight. A Stratton Road woman reported a strange man in her bed, but then realized it was her husband.

  But murder? Never in Rockford. “Are you sure? I mean, couldn’t it have been an accident?”

  “How do you accidentally shoot someone in the back of his head with a nail gun?” Nancy asked.

  Lainie felt queasy. One minute Arthur Cavanagh was out having a drink with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and the next he was lying dead in a half-constructed McMansion with a nail in his skull.

  Maybe she and her friends should have told someone about the woman he’d been with. Or maybe someone else had told someone about the woman. Maybe someone had told Patty, who’d insisted just last year that she would kill her husband if she ever learned that he was cheating on her.

  Patty. A fresh wave of nausea rolled through Lainie as she thought of her teammate. Patty was such a cheerful woman. She gave all the pre-game pep talks because she was so much more upbeat than Coach Thomaston, who generally addressed the team as if they were marching into Kandahar rather than onto a playing field. When Coach Thomaston gave a pre-game speech, Lainie found herself wishing she’d doubled her life insurance. When Patty gave a pre-game speech, Lainie’s toes twitched with eagerness inside her cleats.

  Patty couldn’t have killed Arthur. Everyone had been talking big at the sports bar last summer, but they hadn’t meant that they would literally kill their husbands if the guys were caught philandering. It had simply been their way of demonstrating how strongly they felt about adultery. Nobody on the Colonielles was a murderer.

  Still, Lainie felt nauseous. Not just because a man she knew was now dead, not just because a homicide had occurred within her town’s tranquil borders, but because she’d seen him last night. She and Angie and Sheila.

  And he’d been with that other woman. And they hadn’t told anyone.

  “That’s terrible,” she said, since Nancy seemed to expect her to offer her opinion of the situation. As if she could have said anything else: Oh, what fun news! Thanks for telling me, Nancy. You’ve made my day. Ignoring her disheveled reflection, she headed for the door. Before Nancy could share any additional gory details—the nail gun information was already more than Lainie wanted to know—she fled from the faculty women’s room.

  She couldn’t possibly go to the staff dining lounge. Everyone would be talking about Arthur Cavanagh there. He’d been a Hopwell parent, after all. At least five teachers at the school had taught his son, and many more teachers knew Patty from her volunteer work with the PTO.

  Fighting off another spasm of nausea, Lainie stalked back down the hall to her classroom. If running in the hallways were allowed, she would have sprinted the distance and been shut safely inside within ten seconds. Instead, she walked at a stately pace, praying she wouldn’t encounter anyone she knew on the way. If she opened her mouth to speak, she might vomit, and she really didn’t want to do that.

  Fortunately, most of the upper-grade classes were in the cafeteria right now, and their teachers were probably all in the lounge, eating their lunches and tsk-ing over the tragedy that had stricken their quiet little community. Lainie made it into the classroom without seeing anyone, shut the door, and collapsed onto her chair at her desk.

  Oh, God. Arthur murdered. Did Sheila and Angie know? She had to contact them.

  Angie would be at work right now; she handled human resources for Lamola’s, her husband’s chain of gourmet pizzerias. But Sheila would be home. She’d gone the full-time mom route after Brendan was born, and after adding two more children and a golden retriever to the family, she hadn’t gotten around to reviving her career. “I miss the money,” she often said, “but I don’t miss the work. Does that make me a bad person? Am I ruining things for other women?”

  “Feminism means you’re allowed to stay home if you choose,” Lainie always assured her. “As long as you keep playing soccer, you haven’t betrayed the sisterhood.”

  She pulled her cell phone from her tote bag and punched in Sheila’s number. The minute Sheila answered, Lainie blurted out, “Arthur Cavanagh is dead. They found his body in a house in Emerson Village. He was shot with a nail gun.”

  “A nail gun?”

  Why this struck Sheila as more significant than the larger fact of his murder Lainie didn’t know. “Sheila, we saw him at Olde Towne Olé last night with that lady. And now he’s dead.”

  “Well, we didn’t kill him.” Sheila could be awfully practical.

  “You didn’t tell Patty about last night, did you?”

  “Of course not,” she said indignantly. “We all agreed not to say anything.”

  “Then you don’t think Patty could have found out and done this, do you?”

  “Patty?” Sheila let out a whoop that could have passed for laughter if the sound didn’t have a strange, slightly hysterical edge. “Does she even know what a nail gun is?”

  “She’s married to Arthur.”

  “Was married,” Sheila said. “And I mean, really. Can you imagine her hanging out at a construction site and watching the crew put up a house?”

  Lainie closed her eyes. No, she couldn’t imagine Patty Cavanagh, with her gazillion-dollar diamond ring, hanging out at a construction site. Patty didn’t even sweat when she played soccer. She always kept a pristine white towel handy with which to dab at her face after each drill. Her warm-up pants and jerseys were perfectly matched, and she had countless different sets—pink, pistachio green, royal blue, white with black and turquoise trim. She once said she loved soccer because it was played primarily with the feet, which meant it didn’t imperil her manicure.

  “Here’s what I’m wondering,” Lainie said into the cell phone, something of an understatement because right now she was wondering about far too many things to list. “Should we tell someone about the woman we saw him with last night?”

  “You think she did it?”

  “I have no idea who did what,” Lainie said. “To tell the truth, I don’t even know what was done. All I know is that Nancy Van Doerr told me he was found at his construction site, shot to death with a nail gun.”

  “Nancy? The school secretary?”

  “She’s a gossip, but her information is almost always accurate.”

  “I don’t know, Lainie. She was wrong about the music teacher getting fired last year. What was her name, DeRizzo or something? Nancy said she was fired for having the kids sing songs that had the word Jesus in them during the holiday concert. It turned out that wasn’t true. She’d gotten a better offer from some school system in Connecticut, and she left, remember? I sat through that concert, and there wasn’t a single song with Jesus in it. ‘Silent Night’ has Jesus in one of the verses, but the kids didn’t sing that verse.”

  Lainie pawed through the clutter of Sheila’s words to find their essenc
e. “So you think Nancy might have her information wrong?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “She sounded awfully sure of herself.”

  “Brendan sounded sure of himself when he said he didn’t have a math test last week. And guess what? He had a math test last week.”

  Lainie let out a long breath. Sheila’s point was valid; Nancy could have gotten the story screwed up. “Whether or not she’s right, there’s a rumor going around that Arthur Cavanagh was killed. And since we saw him last night with that woman . . .”

  “You want me to give Angie a heads-up about this Arthur rumor?”

  “I think she should hear about it before today’s practice. I don’t want her getting blindsided.” Oh, God, practice. Would it get cancelled because of Patty’s loss? No. If Coach Thomaston had access to a field, the Colonielles practiced. A minor glitch like a murdered husband wasn’t going to change that. “I’d call Angie myself,” Lainie added, “but the kids are going to be done with lunch in”—she glanced at the wall clock and groaned—“ten minutes max. I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll call her. You stay cool, Lainie. Guilt is waste of time.”

  Lainie was still contemplating Sheila’s parting words nine and a half minutes later, when her students trooped back into the classroom, refueled and animated. Why should she feel guilty?

  Because she hadn’t told Patty about the blond woman, that was why. Because she hadn’t told anyone about the blond woman. Because she’d seen Arthur Cavanagh with the blond woman and then, the next morning, he had turned up dead.

  If Nancy had the story right.

  What would informing Patty of the other woman have accomplished? If Patty remained in ignorance about her husband’s extracurricular activities—which might not have been limited to a drink at Olde Towne Olé—she could grieve with a pure and open heart. She could believe her husband had adored her and been faithful to her. She could be a loving widow like Lainie, whose husband had never had a drink at Olde Towne Olé with another woman. But then, he was Roger.

  Somehow, Lainie survived the afternoon. She had the class continue their unit on mollusks—she displayed a diagram of the cross section of an octopus, and Hayden Blumenthal led a discussion on how tentacles functioned. Hayden was this year’s girl-student-with-a-masculine-name. Every year, Lainie had at least one; last year she’d had a Taylor, the year before a Jordan and a Brett.

  Hayden did an exemplary job leading the debate, a true accomplishment for her because she stammered. Lainie had been working with her all year. Back in September, she would have dissolved in tears and fled the room if Lainie had asked her to stand at the front of the room and address the class. But Hayden had come around. A success story, Lainie congratulated herself as Hayden returned to her chair.

  A few minutes before her ADHD students’ Ritalin was likely to wear off, she had everyone stand and perform a silly dance and some jumping jacks to burn off excess energy. She did jumping jacks, too. The class thought this was hilarious and she laughed along with them, but she was more desperate than the ADHD kids to deal with the tension churning inside her. If she were given to heavy drinking, a few belts of scotch might have helped, but she was a jock, not a lush—and she had to maintain her dignity as a schoolteacher. So she did jumping jacks.

  At three thirty, her students were gone for the day and she’d finished all her in-school paperwork. Escaping the building without talking to any of her fellow faculty members, she hurried across the staff lot to her Volvo. Once she was safely strapped into her seat, she folded her hands over the steering wheel, closed her eyes, and exhaled.

  Why had the news of Arthur Cavanagh’s death affected her so personally? Was it because Patty was a Colonielle? Because murders never occurred in Rockford? Because Lainie had seen the victim last night? Or was she just suffering the profound empathy of one young widow for another?

  And why the hell did she feel guilty? Sheila’s cryptic comment about guilt had touched a nerve. Honestly, it wasn’t as if Lainie had done anything last night, other than drink a Dos Equis and nibble on tortilla chips and glimpse something that wasn’t her business. Why did she feel as if she was somehow responsible for the fate of the Cavanaghs?

  Maybe Sheila was right. Maybe Nancy had misunderstood or mangled the facts. Maybe instead of being killed by a nail gun, Arthur Cavanagh had broken a fingernail at the construction site. Maybe Lainie had spent the entire afternoon fretting for no reason.

  Her stomach growled with hunger for the lunch she’d never eaten. She pulled her insulated lunch bag out of her tote, unsealed the Velcro closure and removed the apple she’d packed. Tart and juicy, it cooled her mouth and soothed her throat going down. She devoured it to the core, wiped her hands and face with a napkin and smiled.

  A broken fingernail. She greatly preferred that story to Nancy’s.

  She steered out of the parking lot, passing an Under-Ten soccer team practicing on the field behind the school building. Scampering back and forth across the newly sprouted spring grass, the kids ran hard and happily, ignoring their formations and the desperate pleas of their ruddy-faced coach.

  “Go for it,” Lainie whispered under her breath, remembering her early experiences with soccer. Running, kicking a ball, giggling. Bliss.

  She’d intended to drive straight home but her car defied her, cruising past her turnoff and continuing toward the entry to Emerson Village Estates. If Arthur had broken a fingernail, he’d be at work now. His crew would be sawing and banging and erecting houses with as much energy as the children had been running around the soccer field behind the school.

  It wouldn’t hurt to look, just to reassure herself.

  The road leading into Emerson Village Estates was just a leveled strip of dirt, as yet unpaved. Lainie guided her car carefully around ruts and bumps in the narrow roadway. On either side stood walls of pine forest, but up ahead the forest opened like a raw wound, with trees swept away to transform the acreage into developable lots. The expanse was barren and dusty, as if someone had blasted the area with Agent Orange.

  What a waste of beautiful trees, she thought as she steered past the first few empty lots, aiming toward the one house standing halfway up the not-yet-existent street. The house’s exterior walls were plywood, with sheets of insulating material covering about half their surface. Like most oversized suburban houses, this one had multiple levels of roof, cutouts where Palladian windows would go, bigger cutouts for the three-car garage, jutting wings, and an enormity that Lainie found ostentatious.

  It also had yellow crime-scene ribbon circling the yard, and two police cruisers and a dark green Jaguar parked in front.

  Crime scene tape and two police cars would not be there for a broken fingernail.

  She let her car roll to a stop and stared at the half-finished house rising up from the soil like a bloated fungus. Those walls must have been constructed with the aid of nail guns. All the boards, all the plywood, the floors, the beams, the struts. All those nails.

  How big a crew did Arthur have? Where had he been when he was found? Was the inside of the house splattered with blood? Did the inside even have walls, or was it just a skeletal frame? How may rooms would a house like that have, anyway? More rooms than any ordinary family could possibly need.

  Forget the house, she scolded herself. Think of Patty. What a tragic coincidence that, out of a team of sixteen Colonielles, two should be widows. Should Lainie perform some special widow ritual with Patty?

  She wasn’t much of a rituals-person herself. Her parents had urged her to sit shiva after Roger had died. “Even if you don’t believe, sweetie,” her mother had said, “it’ll make you feel better.” Lainie had doubted that wearing a torn blouse and sitting on a stool in her house for a week while friends and relatives struggled mightily to cheer her up would make her feel better. The elaborate Wasp funeral Margaret had staged for
Roger hadn’t made Lainie feel better, either. In the days and weeks after he’d died, the only thing that had made her feel better was gathering Karen and Randy to her and smothering them in hugs.

  Patty had Sean, at least. She could smother her son. She was probably smothering him right now.

  Turning her gaze from the dismal vista of all that yellow crime-scene tape, Lainie noticed a pickup truck parked in the lot across the street from the house. A foundation had been poured, massive slabs of gray jutting up from the large pit that had been dug in the center of the lot. No one was working, though. With the boss dead, Arthur’s crew must have taken the day off.

  So whose truck was that? Arthur’s? She couldn’t imagine him driving a truck, especially a battered, mud-splashed pickup like that one. He’d been the boss, after all. Very successful. Very wealthy. Patty drove a Range Rover. The green Jaguar was probably Arthur’s car.

  Cruising closer, she noticed someone behind the wheel of the truck. Another nosy Rockford resident, she figured, there to gape at the murder scene.

  She pulled alongside the truck and used the automatic button to lower the passenger’s side window. The man behind the wheel of the truck had his window open, too. He turned to look at her, and she saw a handsome, pleasantly weathered face. A few interesting creases and crags framed his intensely blue eyes, emphasized his chin, and tugged at the corners of his mouth. His hair was a thick, wavy mop, not much darker than the sandy dirt of the unbuilt lots, although she noticed a few gray strands mixed into the blond. Marianne at Stellara could surely recommend a wonderful product to deal with his problem.

  He stared at her, apparently waiting for her to speak. “Is it true?” she asked. “What I heard about Arthur Cavanagh?”

  “That would depend on what you heard,” he drawled.